Toilet Training Week One

For those of you who are wondering: no, we don't have a toddler, we have a cat! And she is hopefully going to be litter free in a few months. I'm probably going to post weekly for a while and then these poop-filled posts will start to taper off once she is proficient in toilet using.

Day One:
We cleaned out Gizmo's litter box and put it in storage. We filled her Litter Kwitter tray with new corn litter and set it next to the toilet.

Introduced Gizmo to new system. What does she do? She starts eating the litter! We had this problem when we switched to crystal litter and found the solution to be putting some poo in the clean litter to show her this is where she does her business, not where she eats. It seem to work for the litter box, but then she started sniffing around the apartment, trying to find the bag of clean litter to eat.

Litter is now high up out-of-reach in the kitchen.

It took several hours, but when we woke up the next morning, she had done her business. Success! The Litter Kwitter is on the floor next to the toilet for now. At the end of the week, we will be moving it onto the toilet. Hopefully she will do as well with this stage as she has with the floor.

Day 3:
Gizmo is now doing her business with no problems on the first step of Litter Kwitter. We were worried by introducing many new things at once - haircut trama, new corn litter, moving the potty box to the bathroom, and giving her a new toilet - but she seems to be taking it in stride.

We have been advised to keep the new potty box as scrupulously clean as possible. So, we are scooping out the waste as she creates it. We have been encouraging her like crazy and tell her "Good girl!" every time she uses the potty. Whenever we clean out the box, she gets excited and comes to watch. She especially loves watching her poop getting flushed down the toilet. She has always had a thing for toilets.

Day 5:
Gizmo seems to be adjusting quite well to the new system, so we will be moving the Litter Kwitter to the toilet on Sunday night. The next stages of the system are more difficult, so we plan on moving forward in two week stages for the remainder of the training. If she is having difficulty, we may do them longer. We're talking about a world traveler, our cat, so I think she should be able to do all of this at a good pace :)